A Time of Renewal

I just came back from a walk with Grayson — my dog with three paws — and discovered that spring is finally peeking its head out of the snow.

Crocuses blooming. Daffodils sprouting. The sky that particular shade of brilliant blue that exists in only a few places in this country, and Flagstaff is one of them. The sun warm on my face for the first time in months.

I stood there in the yard and just breathed for a moment.

It had been a hard winter.

I lost Ron — the man who was the wind beneath my wings for sixty-three years — and then, as if grief alone weren’t enough, cataract surgery went wrong and I was told I would need a cornea transplant. For weeks I couldn’t see properly out of one eye. I was navigating loss and paperwork and the thousand practical cruelties that follow a death, half-blind and alone in a quiet house.

And then, one morning about a week before the scheduled surgery, I woke up and could see.

Just like that. The eye had healed on its own.

I sat with that for a long time. I’m not a person who uses the word miracle casually. But I’m not sure what else to call it.

Spring has always felt like permission to start again. Not to forget what winter brought — you don’t forget — but to let the new growth come anyway. To let the crocuses push through the snow without asking whether they’ve earned the right to bloom.

There will still be difficult days ahead. Like the solar eclipse that passes over even the brightest sky, darkness comes and goes regardless of what season we’re in. Grief doesn’t follow a calendar. Neither does uncertainty or loneliness or the particular exhaustion of rebuilding a life from scratch at eighty-three.

But I don’t plan on letting the clouds have the final word.

I am planting things. Writing things. Walking Grayson every morning on his three determined paws and watching the daffodils come up along the path. Making plans I’m not entirely sure I can keep — and making them anyway, because the alternative is to stop making plans altogether and I’m not ready for that.

Spring doesn’t ask whether you’re ready. It just arrives.

I think that’s the wisest thing about it.